Where I write about running, marathons, Home Ownership, DIY projects, marriage, raising twins, growing up Polish and other Mysteries of Life

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Catch up Post and Polish Lessons

I realize it has been two weeks since my last post. I actually have a few draft posts that I have been working on but one thing or another kept me from finishing them up and hitting post. So then this is an attempt to catch up on what's been going on.

For one thing, it's been extremely cold in the Midwest in general and in Chicago in particular. This means I have been WFH whenever feasible. At first
I was reluctant to do so but then I realized 1) it is very sucky out
there, 2) I have a very generous WFH policy and 3)
it is very sucky out there. One particular morning it was so bad, local radio stations were emphatically saying, if you don't need to be out and about, avoid it at all costs.

So for me that means monitoring email in between shoveling the mass
amounts of snow that have landed on our property. During our last big snow, one of my neighbors
was kind enough to run his gas snow plow along the sidewalk and even did
the walkway to many of the houses. I used the opportunity of being home during the winter daylight to remove a good
amount of snow from the balcony above our front porch. While I'm sure
it would have been fine to leave it alone, I feel that removing the snow
will help prolong the lifespan of the front porch roof. Nightingale made me
promise not to attempt to do the back roof above the kitchen.

Because it is very unsafe to run outside, and I'm
not training for anything, I have given myself a free pass to not
workout if I don't feel like it. I won't be able to do this too much
longer if I want to maintain/lose some weight and also get in any type
of shape for my March races.

What I lack in exercise and running, I've made up in practicing my Rosetta Stone. While I'm not by any stretch of the imagination becoming fluent in Polish, I have noticed that I am doing better than the first time I attempted this exercise in 2009. I attribute it to 1) more consistency in doing the lessons once a week EVERY week and 2) blocking out an entire hour of uninterrupted time to go through the exercises.

Rosetta Stone's shtick is that you learn by association so you never actually explicitly see anything that says red is Czerwony
, Koszula
is shirt, or Chłopiec
is boy. Instead you see pictures and hear the word and the spellings. This works fine for nouns and perhaps even the verbs but I am still struggling with possessive pronouns and word tense. Obviously I struggle the most with pronunciation.

So if I want to take this to the next level, I'm going to have to increase from once a week to several times a day, most likely a couple times a week and ideally an hour a day until I get through the three lessons several times.